Off By One

The Midwest Teen Sex Show is freakin’ excellent, even though I’m neither in the midwest, nor a teen.

Because I’ve recently read the tragic news that a Russian spam baron was found dead under suspicious circumstances, and because that’s probably not a good long-term solution to the problem, I bring you:

The universal spam solution critique

Your company advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! 

In the spirit of the silly, here’s a set of 100 things we didn’t know last year, courtesy of the BBC.

Amongst these facts is this: 200 million blogs are no longer updated. Go figure!

I have here incontrovertible proof that our economic system, which allows a nearly-infinite variety of consumer goods, many of which are pointless to the extreme, is the greatest one in the world:

Amazingly enough, despite the fact that he talks like he’s got a mouthful of marbles, Sylvester Stallone makes an excellent interviewee… by email, at least.

Ain’t it Cool News has a long series consisting of fans asking Sly questions, and some of the answers are just comedy gold, and not because I’m laughing at him, because I’m laughing with him, at the questioners.

You’ll have to check out the whole set, but here’s a sample answer:

Please reconsider writing your autobiography! If not, would you consider writing a sequel to ‘Sly Moves’ which would focus primarily on mental health & attitude instead of physical health? I’m picturing a Stallone version of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ - what do you think?

curiousvinnie Mahwah, NJ

Thank you very much. I’m flattered that you think I’m a candidate for stable mental health. But the truth be known, I am insane with long, horrible fits of sanity. Now, if you can make insanity work for you, that’s actually called creativity. If you can’t, that’s called a menace to society. Thank you.

Find the rest:

Round One
Round Two
Round Three
Round Four
Round Five
Round Six
Round Seven
Round Eight
Rounds Nine and Ten
Round Eleven
Round Twelve
Round Thirteen

Can’t say that you’ll read them all, but there are some gems in there.

(PS - apologies for the silly quote layout; I’ll be fixing that sometime soon)

Odds are, Beau should not be allowed to see this link: We Are Your Friends

It’s video, so don’t bother, on a slow connection.

Update:

The file at the original location was moved, so this Youtube link has it. If I find the better version again, I’ll upload it and host it here.

Justice vs. Simian: We Are Your Friends

Update again

The link is fixed, it’s a local file now. Will work ‘til doomsday.

This might mark me as exceptionally nerdy, but I just love this set of warning signs for tomorrow, dug up via the instapundit.

Some favourites:

This is the scary one — it should probably be posted in most banks, office buildings, my building, and Britain.

Perhaps those times when you’ve got a project due the next morning “all of a sudden” even though you never let things sit that long?

My life, according to Shaw, some days.

I can just picture this hanging in an effete coffee shop, over books by Sartre, being studiedly ignored by a gaggle of pseudo-intellectual first-year philosophy students.

Seen over the magazine rack containing US, Cosmo, and Maxim.

I think I should get a shirt with this one on it

From the net.humour namespace:

In a world of fearmongering media and government, it seems to me that life would be better if we could just fucking count!

Found on the interweb a short time ago, and brought again to my attention today by the good folks at MetaFilter:

Events since Duke Nukem Forever was announced.

This is a bit of a sobering list of things that have happened since DNF was announced nine+ years ago. The truly jarring one is the fact that NASA — amongst the most legendarily ponderous bureaucracies in North America — “proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed [the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity] upon Mars where they have been exploring the surface for over 2.5 years.”

Wow.